OpZicht: Doris Hardeman

4 January - 15 March 2017
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Open: Monday - Friday, 11-5 pm; Saturday - Sunday, 12-5 pm

OpZicht is a presentation space in the lobby of Stroom Den Haag for newly registered artists from The Hague. The wall unit functions as a stand or platform where the artist can share his or her work, passion or interest with the audience. Each presentation runs for approximately 7 weeks.
Archive OpZicht presentations 2013-present

Doris Hardeman:
"Around us everything is mastered and marked by time. Consider, for example, tree-rings, stretch-marks, or glaciers. And for instance, a rock has archived time in the layers of sediment, into an inert, mute mass. A fossil is literally a time capsule, a creature petrified forever, a momentum solidified forever. I long to catch this moment, when the clay takes shape, moulded by my hands, determined to become a conserved momentum. As if existing inside a Newton's cradle, swaying back and forth through time and space. There is no beginning and there is no end, here is just the momentum, the act of the hands. As they attempt to create an environment where the ticking of the clock becomes trivial and there is no distinction between to- or yester- day.

This presentation is based on letters from a penpal. It can be read as a fictional relationship between me and the other. The other being the clay, the other being the mould, the other being the moment, or may it even be a note from yesterday?"

Ex-squeeze me, Sir,
I sure do hope that you don't mind me asking, about your status quo?
For I find mine always in motion, relentless as I go
I cup a stone and I see time, archived in its layers of sediment
The time that I can see also, in the lifelines of my palm 

Ex-squeeze me, Sir,
But sure, you know what happens when I hold you
I think you know that I can say, I definitely can form you
The traces that remain, become in you a proof of my existence
My fingerprints form like a ditch, a birth-mark on your back 

Sir, as I squeeze you, also I fold you
Yet while I make you, you withhold me too
For Sir, you take the shape that I enforce you
Still, in a way I must obey you 

I understand the rules of your stretch
They are not mine to make
For we all know food is not for playing
As a fountain is not for bathing 

You know, Sir, if you fold a branch it snaps
So pretty please, ex-squeeze me, Sir,
I'm just trying to get things straight
What else is left to say

For is my fold your bend
Or is my bend your stretch?

Doris Hardeman (1993), born in Arnhem and raised in the USA and The Hague, is a young artist and graduate from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague where she studied Fine Arts. She uses sculpture as a tool to unravel the spiderweb called her brain. Questions about how and why we take part as human beings and the relation to our surroundings keep her mind cracking. By translating certain subjects into objects she creates her own metaphors mostly resulting in installations containing references towards natural surroundings such as peaks of mountains and heaving oceans. She aims to create a poetic environment where the viewer can elevate its self into a certain state of mind as she finds no hierarchy in seeing towards feeling, the experience goes through all senses.

www.dorishardeman.com

04 Jan '17 - 15 Mar '17
Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Entrance: free